![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Shirley Jackson? A writer mostly famous for one short story, "The Lottery." Is LOA about to jump the shark? And then, in May, here comes an entire volume dedicated to …. You could file all these volumes under the heading, "Cleverly Curating the Franchise." But somehow the Updike volume seems not just physically thin but insubstantial-too much made of a good thing. ![]() There has already been a LOA volume devoted to baseball writing, joining other volumes about American subjects (food, New York, Los Angeles, the legacies of Lincoln and Twain, the environment). Latest reasons for suspicion: at the end of April, the LOA will publish a slim volume containing John Updike's famous New Yorker farewell to Ted Williams, "Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu," fleshed out with a little more eulogizing, published when Williams died. Anyway, it's become harder and harder to ignore the fact that the Library of America is running out of writers. Lovecraft a second-tier writer, but maybe not so mean to call him a fringe author. Hard to say precisely when it started, maybe with the publication of living authors, maybe with whole volumes dedicated to-hmm, maybe it's cruel to label H. It's a suspicion that's been growing for some time. ![]()
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